Critically examine the relevance of Ireland in Stephen’s growth in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Critically examine the relevance of Ireland in Stephen’s growth in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The issue of the national Irish identity and the Irish nationalism as an ideological movement that claims to reaffirm this national identity (in many cases as opposed to the English-Britain one) was ubiquitous in the Irish society during the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century.

And as such, it also occupies an important place in the process of personal and artistic growth of Stephen Dedalus, the transversal theme of novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which it is present from the first pages when baby Stephen memorizes the colors used by his aunt to allegorize the Irish politicians Davitt and Parnell (3–4) to the end with a grown up Stephen leaving Ireland and assuming his responsibility to create a conscience of his race (276).

Throughout the text a dialectical process of assimilation-confrontation of Stephen with the Irish identity takes place, in which Dedalus (following Joyce) adopts a position that is far from being the most comfortable since it is faced to the predominant maximalist positions. On one hand Sthephen Dedalus, as Joyce, is politically committed to his nation, he feels concerned about the future of Ireland, defends the existence of a differentiated Irish identity that longs to be independent and defends the use art for that purpose but, on the other hand, he rejects any form of regressive conservative nationalism as this would only eternalize the present situation, a tradition heavily dominated by the inflexible Irish Catholicism of the early twentieth century.............................................................................................................

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